Nightmare

Nightmare
Clans	Ceceya, Lygos, Rakshasa
Bloodlines	Calacas
Sects	Jati, Laibon, Teteoh
Rituals	None
Combination Disciplines	Nightmare Combination Disciplines
Rarity	Uncommon
Play Status	Restricted

Nightmare is the discipline of terror and dread, a set of powers that can cause the most powerful beings on earth to quake in their shoes and make those less hardy run screaming in fear. Vampires who use it are almost universally dreaded even when they are behaving themselves, and the fact that its effects can be subtle often causes paranoia in others who wonder if it is being used on them.

While the powers of Nightmare can usually scare someone half to death with the right application, they cannot actually control anyone's behavior. Those who suffer from its effects choose how they respond to being terrified, meaning that while some might run as far away as possible, others might curl up into a ball, panic and lash out at those around them, or become full-blown paranoiacs who act out indiscriminately against everyone around them.

Basic Powers

Monstrous Countenance

You may reveal your true monstrous nature to someone who can perceive you, turning on them with whatever hideous shape or gesture you choose. Whomever you show your true face to is horrified and attempts to flee from you, running as far as possible before their fight-or-flight reflex finally turns back off. Hapless victims who are unable to run from you will do their best to hide, and are usually reduced to gibbering in a corner, although they can still defend themselves if attacked.

Terrible Presence

Your presence is so upsetting and disconcerting that it causes others around you to have difficulty holding onto reality when you are near. While you pollute the area with confusing dread, others suffer from seeing things out of the corners of their eyes or panicking far more potently than they normally would. Vampires affected cannot use Willpower, and will often simply leave as they recognize a greater predator that wishes to intimidate them.

Dread

All those around you feel a rising sense of fear and panic, continuing as long as they remain near you. They may not be aware of what's frightening them (in fact, most attempt to rationalize it based on what else might be gong on around them), but they become slowly more and more uncomfortable, anxious, and distressed the longer they remain. Anyone affected by your aura of fear cannot spend Willpower, and most of the time this results in a room clearing out fairly quickly, often without anyone even realizing why.

Face of the Beast

You may choose one victim and appear as a terrifying monster to them and only them; whatever you actually look like most of the time, they perceive you as a horrific nightmare and cannot understand how others are able to be near you. If forced to go near or try to interact with you themself, they are likely to have a screaming meltdown, faint, or Frenzy, all while no one else has any idea what they think they're seeing.

Intermediate Powers

Eye of the Beast

By making direct eye contact with someone, you may unleash the Beast within you, allowing it to reach out and inflict truly primal fear on your victim. Mortals afflicted by this power simply freeze, paralyzed by primeval fear in the face of an apex predator; someone attacking them will break the spell, but cause them to instead try anything and everything to flee from the vampire who is generating the fear. Other vampires must roll to see if they enter Rötschreck from the sheer horror of seeing your inner Beast.

Grand Delusion

You beset others with nightmares, causing them to have horrifying intrusive thoughts that they cannot turn off. You do not choose the thoughts; rather, the victim has visions of whatever things they would find horrifying, imagining such terrors as jumping from a building and smashing to the ground, crushing their arm in a machine, or intentionally stabbing a loved one. Victims of this power often have trouble being around others and are likely to withdraw, and those who don't suffer from a higher incident of tragic accidents than others might.

Shatter the Mind

By speaking a word or two or making a related gesture, you cause a victim who can perceive you to suddenly be confronted with their greatest fear, vividly and inescapably as if it were happening to them right now. Luckier victims gain a derangement and suffer from blackouts and frightened meltdowns, while those who are less than mentally sturdy have been known to go permanently and violently mad. Although the fearsome vision disappears when the vampire causing it leaves the area, the trauma it inflicts can linger on for years or even centuries.

Waking Nightmare

You may now curate a hallucination specifically for a victim, whom you must touch in order to infect with it. Once you have, they continually hallucinate something terrifying, leaving them in a constant state of adrenaline-exhausted stress. Some vampires have an ominous figure follow and watch their victims, while others might punish a murderer with hallucinations of their victims or throw someone's underhanded plot off-balance by making it seem that others are about to betray them.

Advanced Powers

Mortal Fear

You may inspire such overwhelming and horrible fear in a victim that their bodies are actually affected. Mortals seem to age rapidly and often simply drop dead of a heart attack; even those who survive are broken paranoiacs, unable to ever feel safe again or function among others. Vampires cannot die from this power, but they suffer literal pain and anguish as it inflicts damage on them.

Elder Powers

Lingering Malaise

By repeatedly using the powers of Nightmare on the same victim, you can eventually wear their mind down, making them permanently terrified and teetering on the edge of dementia. Victims affected by this power suffer from derangements and terrors that others cannot relieve for them, and the most functional of them become weird recluses and paranoid dangers to others. (The least functional generally cease to function quickly after this power is used on them.)

Paralyzing Glance

By making eye contact, you may paralyze someone semi-permanently, inflicting such overwhelming fear on them that they dare not move a muscle or make a sound, even if it is clear there is nothing dangerous around them. Victims refuse to move or make noise and panic if others do so around them, and if no one intervenes will literally remain exactly where they are, even if something very dangerous is coming their way or they know that they need to be somewhere else. Some elders use this power to "stash" people for convenient later meals since they know they'll stay where they are put, while others use it to cruelly force their victims to stare down an oncoming train or refuse to come inside while dying of hypothermia.

Premonition

You may cause everyone around you to suffer from horrible nightmares the next time they sleep, each person seeing a semi-prophetic vision of some catastrophe coming to pass in the near future. Everyone in your vicinity when you use the power is affected and each person's nightmare is tailored to their own fears and anxieties. While this does not grant any information about what scares them, it can often cause more superstitious vampires to take steps to avoid their visions, unaware that they were planted in them by an outside agent and they might be about to cause a self-fulfilling prophecy by doing so.

Stampede

You can cause literal stampedes simply by being in the midst of a large group of creatures or people and allowing them to feel the dread of your presence. As soon as you do, the entire herd, crowd, or group begins stampeding away from you, often inflicting injury or property damage as they go. You can move up to hundreds of people and animals, although you cannot control where they go or what they do other than knowing that they will always flee the other direction from you. Victims of this power usually rationalize the sudden mob panic by pointing to events around them, or rarely to believe that they are suffering from some form of mass hysteria.

Personal Scourge

You may cause such nightmarish fear that it literally begins to tear your victims' bodies apart from the inside, causing lacerations and welts to appear on their skin in a horrifying spray of blood and pain. Mortals generally die immediately, and vampires and other supernatural beings can be heinously wounded regardless of how tough they might be against normal physical attacks.

Lunatic Eruption

You may make yourself into a psychic bomb of fear, causing everyone within a huge area around you to instantly be overwhelmed with fear, anger, and violence. All those around you begin rioting, fleeing, panicking, and otherwise causing a massive destabilization; they cannot attack you, since you are the source of their fear, and even supernatural creatures run amok if they are not as powerful as you are. While the supernatural effects fade when the sun rises, many riots go on for far longer as hapless people who no longer remember how they were swept up in things still follow their heightened emotions to a brutal conclusion.

Bring Forth the Nightmare

You may set loose your own nightmares, drawing the worst and most potent fears out of your own psyche to unleash on your enemies. Nightmares that escape from you are every bit as horrific as they are in your dreams and subconscious, and they indiscriminately attack and target everyone and everything around them for the rest of the night. Since they are not real beings, they can be fought off with enough force but cannot be destroyed, and will often use dream logic to overwhelm terrified, screaming victims.

This power is rarely seen; even those ancient vampires who possess it are in no hurry to unleash their nightmares, many of them demonic horrors from long before the recording of history, into a world that they, too, currently live in. While the living nightmares will ignore the vampire who uses this power for the most part, the mere sight of them and their activities is more than enough to cause horror and madness in even the most ancient of monsters.

Important Things to Keep in Mind

While it can be tempting to try to use powers such as Grand Delusion or Waking Nightmare to help instead of hurt, vampires with Nightmare discovered very early on that this simply doesn't work. The powers of this discipline can only inflict fear and confusion, not joy or comfort; even with the best intentions, a Nightmare power will always cause fear and harm to its target.

Most Nightmare powers are fairly difficult to recognize as being used by any particular person in the room; while it's easy to blame the hideous Nosferatu in the corner, the discipline can be and is used by vampires who are forgettably neutral or preternaturally beautiful. Others who catch on that a vampire has this discipline are likely to shun them, and those who use such powers are from minor bloodlines, making them more precarious if a city's upper leadership decides to try to remove them from polite society.